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City of Villains first impressions a'plenty
TTH puts on the tights and practices our best evil laugh as we join the thousands thronging the bad side of town in Cryptic Studios' City of Villains, a standalone sequel to its immensely popular City of Heroes. We bring back a report on what you can expect from the Halloween-released villain-fest if you too want to bring some evil balance to Paragon City.

The villainous gameplay is compelling, convincing, and enjoyable, but the most fascinating aspects of the game are, as usual, subject to diminishing returns. While I motored through the first five levels, the pace slackened noticeably from level 6 on. Admittedly, part of this was due to my disappointment over the "power pool" abilities granted at the sixth level- supposedly players would be granted abilities like flight, superspeed, teleportation, and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. These power pool abilities turned out to be severely limited teasers for the real thing; flight was replaced by the marginally-cool "hover" defense buff ability, superspeed by an endurance regeneration buff, and so on. Granted, in MMOs what's a curse can also be a long-term blessing, and my fears that CoV would be a flash-in-the-pan "10 level wonder" were allayed now that I'm looking forward to getting superspeed at the casual weeklong goal of level 14. Being able to do a Flash Gordon impression for a city block or two with a long recharge timer on the baseline ability would be pretty cool, yet it doesn't seem to fit the CoV framework where abilities are never truly superceded by better abilities.

Get the TTH first take on City of Villains.
Related links:

• Game Spy's "out of the box" review of City of Villains.

• Other City of Villains news.